Like Bad Bunny, the NFL wants America to mean the Western Hemisphere.
Roger Goodell is the closest thing humanity has come to a money-generating automaton. South Park made the joke first, and best. Early in his time as the NFL’s commissioner, Goodell, in 2008, made the decision to pull the plug on NFL Europa, a European league that was intended to sell the Old World on America’s actual favorite pastime.
The league was a loser. It was a loser because the game was alien to the European mind, and it wasn’t good football. If Europeans wanted to see a boring sport played by foreigners, they’d just watch soccer.
To replace that league, Goodell opted to proselytize via international games that would feature professional NFL teams playing in some of Europe’s most historic venues. At first, this wasn’t much better than Europa, as the teams that agreed to go overseas were the bottom tier of the NFL — teams that would be relegated if they competed in a Premier League arrangement.
The Patriots were the exception, and they showed the continent why everyone outside of Boston hates them by thumping the Buccaneers and Rams, winning by a total of 80–14. This trend continued until very recently, when the NFL started looking at the youthful, vivacious Central and South American markets. While NFL teams continue to make the trip to Europe, legacy clubs like the Green Bay Packers and Philadelphia Eagles went to Sao Paulo, Brazil, to kick off the season in style. This is where Jim’s Mr. Bunny comes into the picture.
As I wrote in my halftime show review, the Bad Bunny experience was forgettable to a domestic audience. However, it was a signal to the emerging markets to our south that the NFL is serious about treating their currencies just as sweetly as it has accepted the American dollar. Europe is yesterday’s news for the NFL. Its sports properties — soccer, F1, and basketball — are entrenched, mature, and on the wane, just like their member countries. But TV deals in the global south are there to be won for an NFL that has the cash and the will to market itself more aggressively than any other live-event property. For comparison’s sake, the NFL is two and a half times larger than Premier League soccer.
When it comes to domestic politics and the ongoing debate between the NFL being woke or a capitalist playground, Goodell no doubt welcomed the TPUSA alternative to the Super Bowl offering. Let the conservatives have their show. After all, their day was still orbiting his empire’s product.
This is the NFL’s achievement — the world stopped for an old-school defensive bludgeoning that had fewer big plays than peewee flag football. No, it wasn’t because the game was at all magnetic — the Patriots should have never been in that game to begin with, as I noted two weeks ago — but rather because Roger Goodell knows that controversy draws eyes, the global south is starting to feel its oats, and nothing makes money like more people in more places having a strong opinion about your product.